Game Nights – Ad­ven­ture Mart

Last ar­ti­cle I dis­cussed my in­tent and in­ter­est in dif­fer­ent games you can play at fam­ily game nights, so you are not stuck play­ing Mo­nop­oly for the fifth time. This week I’ll be dis­cussing the rather fun, col­or­ful and silly, Ad­ven­ture Mart. This game, made by Digis­prite , will set you back about 25 dol­lars but is well worth it for a fun, cute, and sur­pris­ingly deep deck builder

The ob­ject of the game is that you run a con­ve­nience store in a fan­tasy world, where you need to hire work­ers, buy lu­cra­tive and ex­pen­sive items for your shelves, and buy fix­tures to make life work­ing a 9 to 5 in a dun­geons and drag­ons, high fan­tasy dun­geon sell­ing luke­warm hot dogs and scratch tick­ets. 

The board has a cute, easy to read, and very col­or­ful de­sign, which gives it last­ing ap­peal. My two co testers both agreed the style is very ap­peal­ing, with a chil­dren’s story/ anime style. 

The game it­self is pretty sim­ple, you each take turns ei­ther buy­ing stock, hir­ing em­ploy­ees, or buy­ing fix­tures to add to your store. em­ploy­ees and fix­tures can ei­ther make stock cheaper to buy, help make your stock look more lu­cra­tive to would be ad­ven­tur­ers, or just screw over your fel­low min­i­mum wage worker on the way to the very top.

Things get re­ally spicy when a cus­tomer ar­rives, see each cus­tomer has cer­tain needs, and a cer­tain amount of cash in their pock­ets. So you need to out bid your op­po­nent to make your stock seem cooler than theirs. This can be with buy­ing ex­pen­sive and rare items, hav­ing cool fix­tures that make your stock look bet­ter, or ruin your op­po­nents stock in var­i­ous, evil ways. Tem­pers sure can flare in this game, friend­ships tested, and voices will cer­tainly raise. 

The game ends af­ter five in game days of buy­ing, sell­ing and giv­ing liv­ing wage to a bipedal crow man. who­ever has the most cash, most ex­pen­sive items, and best em­ploy­ees be­comes the CEO of Ad­ven­ture Mart, those losers are sent to the Shadow Realm for a train­ing sem­i­nar be­fore be­ing let out in the world again. 

My two friends who helped test this cer­tainly had some good things to say as well, such as Kevin who said that – “The game was chaotic and fun though a lit­tle dif­fi­cult to learn at the start, how­ever once was had got­ten un­der­way it was quite tac­ti­cal and hat a lot of nu­ance as to when to play cer­tain cards. Also all the art was Adorable” 

Mean­while Barry, told me af­ter­wards “A shock­ingly deep, yet en­ter­tain­ing game. It can ad­mit­tedly be frus­trat­ing due to some of the cards, but it’s en­dear­ing” 

And I must agree, it’s an en­dear­ing, cute, and de­cep­tively in­tense game of strat­egy, luck and bar­gain­ing and I’d highly rec­om­mend it to any­one with a love of deck builders, cute art, or the big wide world of mar­ket re­search and cap­i­tal­ism.

Thank you again for tak­ing a look at this adorable lit­tle game, and re­mem­ber to take a drink of wa­ter, call your par­ents, and spend like twenty min­utes to do that as­sign­ment.